Paying the Bill

In June of last year, Dr. Pat Santy, writing in her blog, Doctor Sanity , declared her disgust with the healthcare bill, which now seems to be placed firmly about our necks.  I can't say it any better than she does below: 

I'm done.

My entire professional life as a physician and psychiatrist I have been exceptionally vocal about the prospect of government medicine here in the US. I have given impassioned speeches (when I was younger); written essays in medical journals and elsewhere; and talked until I am blue in the face to anyone and everyone about the horrors of socialized medicine and government interference in the health care system of this country. Once it would have seemed impossible that I would ever want to quit medicine; to stop practicing psychiatry.

I have watched with dismay as every year we have inched closer and closer to the Democrats and the left's goals; goals which I firmly believe will completely destroy American medicine. I have watched up close and personal the utter soul-destroying consequences to both patients and doctors alike, of the pervasive cultural collectivist and looter thinking in my specialty. Every time this madness is killed, it just doesn't stay dead. Like some kind of putrefying zombie, the left just keeps resurrecting it. Logic doesn't matter. Facts don't matter.

Let's face it. To the zombies of the left, reality doesn't matter. With President Postmodern in office, aided and abetted by zombie hordes in Congress; why should I pretend anymore that it does?

This time around, I JUST DON'T CARE ANYMORE. If that's what people want, so be it. 

I'm done. If Congress passes Obama's destructive zombie health plan in any form, I quit.

I will simply not practice medicine anymore. I will take my psychiatry books and my years of experience and do something else. I used to wait tables when I was in college. It's an honest living and Obama isn't interested for the time being in nationalizing restaurants--yet.=

Let me be clear. I don't believe that people have a "right" to health care; because, what advocating such a "right" basically means is that you believe you have a "right" to my mind; you have a "right" to my professional competence; i.e., you have a "right" to enslave me.

Having chosen to work primarily in the public sector most of my life, I have watched this entitlement and victimhood mentality grow to incredible proportions in parallel with number of laws, regulations, administrators, and oversight agencies. I have watched the decline of personal responsibility and the rise of endless demands and impossible clinical and psychosocial conundrums that I am expected to solve, even if my patient has no desire to change. I have been demoted to the near-mindless activity of pushing pills to the point that I understand why my collegues see every clinical situation as a biological malfunction--the old adage that says, to a hammer everything looks like a nail, comes to mind. Psychiatrists are the mental health profession's hammer; and drugs are the nail. And, the same powers that tell me to prescribe drugs, warn me against the evil of working too closely with any of the drug companies, for fear I might be corrupted, God forbid, by the dastardly profit motive.

I have watched as the quality of care has inevitably deteriorated even as spending went up. I have watched the system abuse patients and doctors alike--to the point that the frustration level just keeps going up and is simply not worth it anymore.

I quit my memberships in the AMA and APA some years back when I realized that they were not really in it to make things better for doctors or patients. Perhaps at one time they were real advocates for both, but now they are like most of those supposedly "capitalist" businesses--like AIG and all the others-- who willingly feed at the government trough and can't get enough of that yummy government pork. They sold themselves long ago--in both areas of clinical and research medicine-- in order to have a place at Big Government's table....

We will all see what happens when and if the zombies take over health care in this country and make it all like Medicare and Medicaid....and GM and Fannie Mae and etc. etc. 

I expect a Zombie Health Czar (Barney Frank would be perfect) will be appointed any day now. Someone who will have control over doctors' compensation and drug company profits. Someone who won't have to answer to the public who can control implementation of any aspect of the zombie plan that needs to bypass intelligent scrutiny.

Even with the vote, it isn't quite over yet.  Many state Attorneys General (including ours here in South Carolina) plan to fight this monstrosity on the basis of Constitutionality.  It is felt that the Federal Government does not have the right to force citizens to purchase a product, any product.  We will see.